The story so far
In May 2025, the Office of the Registrar General of India (ORGI), functioning under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), released three key reports for the reference year 2021: the Sample Registration System (SRS) Statistical Bulletin, the Civil Registration System (CRS) Vital Statistics, and the Medical Certification of Cause of Death (MCCD) Annual Report. This long-delayed release—nearly four years after the reference year—offers a snapshot of India’s demographic numbers. While the numbers have triggered debates among policymakers and analysts, what deserves deeper understanding is the machinery behind the statistics.
What are vital statistics?
Vital statistics refer to data on life events—births, deaths, marriages, migration and stillbirths—within a population. They form the backbone of demographic analysis, enabling accurate social planning, health policy, and welfare distribution. Reliable vital statistics are essential for designing targeted programmes and tracking national development indicators over time. Vital statistics, including the registration of births and deaths, are listed under Entry 30 of the Concurrent List in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution.
A colonial blind spot
Mahatma Gandhi, during the Independence movement, said, “100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.” While this emphasised the power of non-violent resistance, it may not have taken into account, another, invisible force at play that enabled colonial rule: data. The British Raj mastered the art of governance through record-keeping—be it through the Survey of India (1767), the Great Trigonometrical Survey(1802), Geological Survey of India (1851), Archaeological Survey of India (1861), Census (from 1865), Botanical Survey of India (1890), and Zoological Survey of India (1916). These surveys, rudimentary by today’s standards, were among the most sophisticated data collection tools of their time. Through them, the British measured human lives, understood flora and fauna, culture and ethnicity, and mapped the length and breadth of land, rivers, mountains and seas across the Indian subcontinent —enabling taxation, land control, plunder of natural resources and military interventions. In short, colonisation was underwritten by meticulous measurement of land, sea, river, culture and its people.
While India inherited systematic record-keeping from the British, its evolution has fallen short of the digital age. Reliance on the decennial censuses (the last being in 2011), sample-based SRS, partially filled Medical Certification of Cause of Death (MCCD) forms, incomplete CRS coverage, and the absence of full digitisation (currently ongoing) of vital events underscores the inadequacy of our present infrastructure for real-time, responsive governance.
Census
The census in India is conducted once a decade using the de-jure method by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India (ORGI). It is the largest administrative exercise in the country, covering every household, individual, and structure. The Census collects data on age, sex, religion, language, literacy, marital status, employment, migration, disability, and housing conditions. It is conducted in two phases: the House listing and Housing Census, followed by the Population Enumeration. While exhaustive and universal, its decadal frequency makes it unsuited for timely policy planning or dynamic welfare targeting. Given the Census is decennial, India requires systems like CRS, SRS, and MCCD to capture vital events every year to support timely policymaking.
Sample Registration System
The Sample Registration System (SRS) was born as a stopgap and introduced on a pilot basis in 1964–65 and became fully operational in 1969–70 with 3700 sampling units. It was conceived to temporarily supplement the Civil Registration System (CRS), which was still under development following the passage of the Registration of Births and Deaths Act 1969. Yet, even today, SRS remains the mainstay for estimating India’s birth rate, death rate, infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate, cause of death, abridged life tables and fertility patterns.
The SRS begins with a baseline survey, during which a map of the sample area is prepared, all households are listed, and demographic details—including age, sex, education, marital status, and reproductive history—are recorded. This is followed by continuous enumeration of vital events, especially births and deaths, by part-time local enumerators (typically local Anganwadi workers or teachers). Full-time supervisors independently conduct retrospective surveys every six months to update household rosters and verify reported events. The data from both sources are then matched. Unmatched or partially matched events are re-verified through field visits to ensure accuracy and completeness. SRS then deploys ‘Verbal Autopsy’ to ascertain causes of death that are without medical certification. Trained investigators collect narratives from family members of the deceased, which are reviewed by two independent physicians under the Minerva project, coordinated with the Centre of Community Medicine, AIIMS. The causes of death are classified per the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), ensuring comparability with global health standards.
The SRS currently operates across 8,842 sample units—4,959 rural areas and 3,883 urban locations. It covers approximately 8.4 million people—barely 0.6% of India’s population. Each SRS sample unit covers around 2,000 people in rural areas and 750–1,000 in urban enumeration blocks. The sampling units are updated once in 10 years, the last being in 2014. By its very nature, SRS carries an inherent scientific limitation: it is an estimate based on a sample of roughly 8.4 million people used to extrapolate for a population of over 1.4 billion. Hence, all indicators carry upper and lower confidence intervals with no district-level data. While SRS remains a methodologically rigorous source for national-level mortality and fertility estimates, these figures must be interpreted with statistical caution—they are informed estimates, not actual counts. It was designed to provide annual estimates of vital indicators at state and national levels—not exact counts.
Civil Registration System
Enacted through the Registration of Births and Deaths (RBD) Act 1969, the Civil Registration System is the system that records births, deaths and stillbirths universally across India as a continuous, compulsory, and routine process. Much of the data is generated within the health system that reports events to the registrar. However, for vital events occurring outside health facilities, the revenue department and gram panchayats play a vital role in registration. In 2021, the CRS recorded 2.42 crore births, 1.02 crore deaths, and over 50,000 stillbirths. These are actual counts, not estimates, and provide legal documents necessary for inheritance, education, and social benefits. CRS data is also used to calculate future population projections, sex ratio, medical research and provide real-time data at the sub-district level.
MCCD
The Medical Certification of Cause of Death (MCCD), introduced alongside the RBD Act, mandates that deaths in medical institutions be certified by a physician (Sections 10(2) and 10(17)). Yet, coverage remains dismal. In 2021, only about 23% of all registered deaths had a medically certified cause. This gap has serious consequences. Cause-specific mortality statistics are crucial to track health trends, plan interventions, and advance research. Physicians certify the cause of death using WHO standards in Form IV/IVa, detailing immediate, antecedent, and comorbid conditions. Vital events like births and deaths though biological means, establish legal existence, underpinning citizenship, internal security, benefits and inheritance.
Thus, data for MCCD, SRS and CRS originates in the health system, but ORGI, under MHA, compiles and publishes it for use across welfare ministries.
NFHS
Beyond SRS and CRS, India has also been conducting health surveys since the 1990s. Foremost among them is the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), initiated in 1992–93 and conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai. NFHS gathers data on nutrition, fertility, reproductive health, child immunisation, contraception, domestic violence, and non-communicable diseases. While NFHS offers invaluable insights into health behaviours and socio-economic determinants of health, it is a sample survey, not a registry. It cannot be used for administrative purposes like issuing documents or real-time tracking.
The need for a continuous population registry
In an era of digital governance, periodic surveys and retrospective registrations like SRS, CRS, and NFHS are no longer adequate. A Continuous Population Registry (CPR)—a real-time, digital database that continuously records births, deaths, and migrations—is already used in some countries. India needs such a unified system. The SRS, though useful, is a sample and a stopgap; MCCD remains incomplete, and NFHS is not governance-oriented. A CPR is essential to citizen-focused data infrastructure for timely, targeted policymaking.
(Dr. C. Aravinda is an academic and public health physician. The views expressed are personal. [email protected])
Published – May 17, 2025 10:29 am IST